Delete Individual System Restore Points - WinXP - All

HOW DO I?  : -

Does anyone know how to do, or of a program that safely does, an individual or selective removal of WinXP System Restore Points (other than creating other regular hard or soft system back-ups with System Restore turned off)?

WHY? : -

I'm sure there a lots of us who would love it to free up disk-space taken up by largely useless gigabytes of never to be used restores, but keep at least one known good restore point.

One of my PC's is pretty old and only has 40Gb Hard drive. If I install a larger Hard Drive it will invalidate my XP licences. Trust me on this, it has happened to me and some of my clients, and a right royal pain in the preverbial to get it revalidated for free (excluding phone calls, time, lost system, and so-forth and so-on) if at all. So this is not an option. External storage devices are also inappropriate as many programs must be written to the core drive.

I recently stopped the Restore Service and it returned over 8Gb of extra free space. There were about 60 restore points from the past 2 months alone. Any system changes, including minor software additions or deletions, trigger a restore point and more often than not, several in the one day.

I have the slider bar set to minimum on how much space to use, but it doesn't seem to abide by the rule and just keeps adding and adding.

I tried the in-built Clean Up program, but it was as useless as a lawnmower on Pluto.

However, I would like to keep only 2 + 1 permanent Restore points, one  initial and one after loading drivers and known safe software etc., plus one latest that will overwrite itself at a designated time, or better still, manually.

I also have a PC with 1TB Hard Drive, with about 300Gb used space,which appears to suffer similar, if not more. I tested it by running SuperAntiSpyware with Ignore System Restore box unticked. The restore portion alone was still being scanned about an hour later. The rest of the system scan time was about the same as an antivirus scan, maybe a bit quicker. Don't get me wrong, this antispy program is terrific.

ANOTHER MS ISSUE : -

It also begs the question; Why has MS made this "Folder?" inaccessible to the average and not so average user? and ; Why are the user selective editing parameters so limited?

Scoffer

(still waiting for DX10 for XP zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)